Mazatlan, Mexico – June 16-17, 2018

Hello, from sunny Mazatlan, Mexico and the Traders Point team serving alongside our friends from Back2Back this week. Back2Back Ministries is an international non-profit organizaion that is dedicated to being a voice for orphans. If you’re curious about the courageous work they are doing to help vulnerable children all over the world, visit back2back.org.

What you might not read about on their website is just how intentional and genuine their staff is. We have been welcomed so well, and while Back2Back exists to serve the needs of orphans and impoverished children, the folks here have already ministered to our team in meaningful ways.

Just after 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, June 16, six of our team members took off from the Indianapolis airport. Dallas was an important stop as we convened with four more members; three from Virginia and one from Arkansas. The group was complete and our flight to Mazatlan was a breeze. We landed and figured out that the people on our flight wearing the same blue t-shirts were also headed to Back2Back this week. Staff arrived, and the blue shirts from Kansas got in one van and the gray shirts from Indy got in another.

B2B, like its name suggests stands back-to-back with partner organizations to meet the spiritual, physical, educational, emotional, and social needs that they may overcome their life circumstances and break free from the cycle of generational poverty. They do this with three such groups here in Mazatlan, and upon our arrival, we spent some time with two of them at a pool party/cookout (we’ll get to the third here in a moment). Many of our team were nervous about the language barrier—wondering how we would ever connect with and show love to someone we can’t speak to. It turns out that fun is somewhat of a universal language and we enjoyed our Saturday afternoon together splashing around and eating hamburgers.

Exhausted, we settled in and got to bed early—we would need the rest for an exciting and full Sunday to come.

Sunday, June 17: Breaking Ground

El Rancho de los Ninos might be familiar to some of you who have been around Traders Point or who have invested in this relationship with Back2Back here in Mazatlan. Rancho is the third of the three groups mentioned earlier. Rancho is a facility where 14 orphaned children with special needs live under full-time care. Rancho is where our group will spend each day of this week laboring with our hands and opening our hearts to these 14 amazing young kids.

Some exciting things have been happening at Rancho and we are so thrilled and humbled to be a part of what God is doing here. Last week they celebrated the completion of four family-style housing units that they will use to begin transitioning the boys into. They currently reside in dorms in a single building. The care they receive there is and has been a wonderful thing for them, but B2B’s goal is to put them in homes with a family. These brand new facilities will do just that. It will also allow the kidss to have somewhere to go home to—someone to go home to. This provides some healthy separation from the place where they sleep at night and the place they receive therapy and education for some. This is a really, really big deal for the lives of these kids, and we are praising God for the completion of those buildings.

The celebration continued today (Sunday) as we “broke ground” on some big renovations that will be made to the center the kids are currently living in. We’ll be able to tell you more details about these renovations in the coming days, but as we toured Rancho today, we all agreed there is an overwhelming amount of hope and excitement about the future here—amongst the staff and caretakers and amongst the children. We are especially excited about these renovations because our love for these kids and the potential an updated facility might have on their lives. TPCC’s special needs minister, Wendy Wilken, has been working with B2B staff on plans for the renovations and how Traders Point can help resource this new center to better serve the needs of not only these 14 but for other orphans and vulnerable children in the community.

This occasion served to remind us all on Father’s Day just how much our Heavenly Father loves each of us and how dearly he loves the children of Rancho de los Ninos.

As we get started tomorrow on some of more physical work that needs to be done around the facility, please pray for our team, the B2B staff, the caretakers, and for the many vulnerable children around the globe.

Here’s a look back across some of the new construction toward the resource center awaiting renovation.